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Public transit

Posted by (Maryland) on

Sorry guys, have more questions now that I'm on the cusp of the trip

  1. I have a half-fare card purchased and the SBB app downloaded. Do you buy your tickets through the app and do those tickets live in the app or iPhone wallet? Or do you buy physical tickets at a kiosk?

  2. If my trip includes say, a bus ride, then a train ride, then a gondola ride...are those all separate tickets or bundled into one?

  3. I'm traveling from Lucerne to Colmar - the app obviously won't let me buy a ticket past Basel since I'm going out of country. Is it pretty straightforward once we get off the train in Basel to then buy our ticket into France? Is there customs at the Basel train station?

  4. My hotel in Lucerne gave me a free travel visitor card, now downloaded into my iPhone wallet. As long as we stay in "zone 10", we can just get on and off buses/trains without checking in with ticket desks right? Just as if I had the Swiss Travel pass right?

  5. No need to pre-purchase any tickets right? I don't think we're going to do any Panorama trips.

Posted by
6875 posts

  1. If you have the app and data, it is much easier to buy through the app!

  2. I do not remember, sorry

  3. It is quite straightforward but you need to allow some time, because the platforms for French trains are a bit far away, at the end of a long corridor. There is a customs office, unstaffed 99.9% of the time, and they're not here to monitor travellers anyway - there are no border controls in the traditional sense.

  4. Yes, it works like a pass, nothing to validate.

  5. No need

Posted by
32696 posts

Q2. Buy a ticket from Interlaken Ost to Gimmelwald. It will include the BOB train up to Lauterbrunnen and the Postbus to Stechelberg and the cable car up to Gimmelwald - all one ticket...

Q3. Buy your ticket on line or on the SNCF app before hand. You don't want to queue for a ticket in Basel. Then just walk to the remote French platforms.

all others as balso

Posted by
39 posts

For Q3: that’s two separate tickets right? I need to buy one on the SBB app to Basel and then a different website for Basel to Colmar?

Posted by
2661 posts

It’s all on one ticket—Lucerne to Colmar. If you want to make things easy, you can just go to the ticket counter in the Lucerne train station. Tell the agent what you want and they will print the ticket for you. You can do this the day before you travel.

I had the Swiss Travel Pass last year and whenever I took day trips out of Switzerland to France and Germany that the Pass did not fully cover, I just went to the ticket counter the day before to get the tickets. I showed them the Pass to get the partial discount, and just told them where and when i wanted to travel. That for me, was much easier than trying to figure out the ticket machines which we had some issues with.

Posted by
39 posts

That makes sense, Carrie. Thanks

If you buy a ticket but for some reason miss that train is it easy to transfer to a different time? Just go to the ticket counter I suppose…

Posted by
6875 posts

Unless you buy a specific discounted ticket, tickets are not specific to a given train for the Luzern-Basel-Colmar route, so it does not matter if you miss a train!

Posted by
4375 posts

Carrie is right, unless the line at the ticket office is horrendously long, why not interact with a human? They can be quite helpful.

Even though I have to admit, when I got my free transit card in Berne some years back, the guy gave me some bad tram advice. Luckily I've been on enough mass transit to know to look at the map onboard and I caught his mistake.

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